Disclaimer

This blog is not an official, LDS Church-sponsored product, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

Monday, November 30, 2015

A Call for Personal Family Histories.

Beginning in January I will be posting a series on the Church 100 years ago in Tennessee. I have been able to collect quite bit from 1916 based on official records, newspapers, and the like. But one piece I am having problems collecting are details about the members in Tennessee. They didn't write as many journals or leave much of a trail.

With that in mind I'd like to make the following appeal. If you have family that were members of the Church in Tennessee in 1916. I'd be very interested in who they were and what you know about them. A journal or some letters would be perfect, but I'm not very optimistic about finding very much like that. What I think would be more likely is something like "My great aunt joined the Church in Nashville back around that time but we don't know much more than that." Every little bit helps.

Similarly I'd be interested in the same for any year, but for a little bit I will be focusing on just one year. Why? I'll have to take a moment or two to explain that as we get closer to 2016. But I will say it has nothing to do with any great or momentous event that made the year stand out. It was just another year with real people doing ordinary things.

Part of the process will involve the use of social media to create the sense of what it was like. There will be missionary stories, conversion stories, even a few hints of practices we do now that were already part of the landscape 100 years ago. The bulk of it will be here in my blog. But there will also be shorter more frequent snippets on Twitter. So if you are not already following me on Twitter (see the link on the left), I encourage you to do so.

Finally I am hoping a few of you will have found this page because you were searching the Web for hints about an ancestor. To that end I will post a list of names at the bottom of this page. If that name brings you here, let me know. I'm sure there will be more we can share with each other.

7 comments:

Yes, I have a baptism from each of those families in 1916. Look for a post next year just on the Turkey Creek branch. But all three of those girls were living in Waverly when they were baptized instead of in Turkey Creek. Any guesses why?

Generically, Humphreys County towns would have been Waverly, Johnsonville (New Johnsonville after the dam was built on the Tennessee River to create Kentucky Lake) and McEwen. Turkey Creek is about 8 miles north of Waverly. Plus anyone living in Houston and Humphreys County were members of the Turkey Creek Branch until a building was purchased in Waverly and the Branch was renamed the Waverly Branch. The building for the Turkey Creek Branch was sold as a home and a couple of years later burned.

I can see that. At the time the Church used rural delivery post office in the place of an address on membership records for nearly everyone except for "city dwellers." I could see Waverly as being the closest post office to Turkey Creek. I'll have to look that up.